Zogby: Obama Lead Down To Four

Democrat Barack Obama has a 4-point national lead over Republican John McCain as they head into the final week of the presidential campaign, according to a Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll released on Tuesday.

Obama leads McCain by 49 percent to 45 percent among likely voters in the three-day national tracking poll, a slight dip from his 5-point advantage on Monday. The telephone poll has a margin of error of 2.9 percentage points.

…

McCain, a veteran Arizona senator, has sliced Obama’s 12-point advantage by more than half in the last five days but he has not been able to break through the 45 percent support mark.

Probably more significant is Obama slipping under the 50 percent mark.

The real key will be to see if this signals movement in important state battles. That probably wouldn’t be seen until later in the week.

has what seems to me (statistics is part of my day job) the best publicly available compilation of polls. Their analysis of this Zogby poll (and Bradley effect for that matter!) is very interesting. Apparently Zogby assumes that the Republican/Democrat demographic didn’t change since 2004.

But then again polling is a murky business, so any poll by itself probably doesn’t mean anything.

Zogby’s been wrong often enough to be unreliable, and, in this case, I think he’s still overestimating Obama’s lead. Not only have the “redistributionist” remarks from 2001 not been factored in, yet, but I still think the PUMA vote may be decisive, as well as the people motivated by his “bittergate” comment.

Do these polls include brand new voters like Mickey Mouse, Dela Ware, Saddam Hussein, “pfpfpfpfpfpf”, the Dallas Cowboy starting lineup, and many thousands of others registered by the busy little beavers at ACORN, who (according to one source) has signed up over 3 million “new” voters since 2004?

I have a strong suspicion that the election has been in the tank for the Chosen One for quite some time.